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​Oh, It's "Idiot-Proof"? Watch This.​

On a scale of one to ten, ten being the dumbest possible thing that could have happened in this particular situation, I immediately rated it a solid 8/10. It was pretty dumb, but a 10/10 would have had to have resulted in serious injury or death, or at least $1,000 in unnecessary costs, I think.

With one fumble outside the ice cream shop, I had just turned our bike lock into a 3.75-pound dead weight. It’s a combination chain lock, and you can set your own 4-digit numerical code via a button you can only access when the lock is unlocked. Hilary and I use our cargo bike almost every weekday, and we leave the chain lock on the bike. We chose the combination-style lock so neither of us would have to worry about carrying a key for the lock (or forgetting the key). This system has worked really well for almost two years.

At this point in my life, I have started to learn to be careful about calling something “idiot-proof,” because in my experience, that often means that

1. somebody will manage to disprove the idiotproofness of the thing I called “idiot-proof,”
2. that somebody usually turns out to be me, which
3. makes me an idiot (which I don’t dispute, but don’t need frequent reminders)

Somehow, while locking the cargo bike to a rack near the ice cream shop, the lock slipped out of my hand as I was scrambling the number dials to lock it. I picked up the lock, pulled the chain back together to re-lock everything, and saw that the bolt assembly was closed and locked. So I entered our combination to unlock it, only to find that our combination no longer worked. Which meant that I must have, miracle of miracles, also pushed the button to reset the combination (I must stress here that this is not that easy to do). And now, I had no idea what the new combination was.

At this point, I said FUUUUUUUUUUCK, but only in my head, because Jay was sitting in the back seat of the cargo bike, and we are trying to keep him from being The Kid Who Says Fuck All The Time At Preschool Which Means His Parents Are Terrible Parents. I looked at Hilary and said something like, “I think I just ruined the bike lock.” We ran a cable lock through everything and walked over to eat some ice cream.

When we got home, I brought the now-useless chain lock into the house and googled “reset Kryptonite Keeper 790 combo chain,” and wouldn’t you know it, the first sentence of the support article on the manufacturer’s website is this:

Obviously this makes sense because, well, logic. But still, I was disappointed.

I now had two options:

1. Buy another lock
2. Try to figure out the new/accidental combination

Since there are four digits in the combination, the number of possible combinations from 0000 to 9999 is 10,000. Ten thousand? Who has time for that? We would just have to replace the lock. It was, what, $50 when I bought it two years ago? I googled it, and a similar lock was now $75. I cringed. Seventy-five dollars, a solid chunk of money, but a good investment for someone who’s in the market to buy a bike lock for their bike, the replacement cost of which was much more than $75. But way too much money for a doofus who just accidentally reset his combination.

There was the money, but also disappointment and, OK, maybe shame, that I had just turned a perfectly usable lock into a piece of garbage. I had the money, but I would rather spend it on something a little less, how do you say, idiotic?

I started at 0000. I turned the farthest right dial to 1, for 0001, and pulled on the lock to test it. Nope. What did that take, one second, maybe two? Two seconds times 10,000 combinations, 20,000 seconds, that’s 333-ish minutes, or about 5½ hours. That’s for all 10,000 combinations, and I wouldn’t necessarily have to try all 10,000. If I did a few minutes at a time, I would probably crack the code sometime over the weekend, right?

0002, pull, nope. 0003, pull, nope, 0004, pull, nope, 0005, pull, nope. This was discouraging. I decided to start at 9999 instead, so that the number on the dial would be counting down instead of up.

I tried a couple hundred combinations, set the lock down, tried a couple hundred more, took a break, and did a few more. I made it to 9420. This strategy also didn’t feel sustainable.

Lying in bed the next night, I tried to remember which way my thumb would have been oriented to scramble the dials from our original combination. Up? Down? Maybe I should start at that number and go up?

So I did. The next morning, I set the lock to our original combination, and started bumping the dials up one number at a time. I did a few dozen, set it down, did some laundry, tried a few dozen more, set it down, did some other house stuff, followed Jay around, tried some more combinations when he needed my presence but not my full attention while he played, and kept going.

I sat in a rocking chair in Jay’s room as he built a “nest” out of all the stuff on his bed. I rolled the dials one digit at at time, pulling on the lock on each new number, when suddenly, 581 numbers away from the original combination, the lock popped open in my hands. I announced to Jay, “We did it, buddy,” and he came over to look. He was not as excited about it as I was, but of course he does not understand money, or even the concept of time yet. Basically, kiddo, Dad is a little less of an idiot than he was a couple days ago. Maybe.

I reset the combination, on purpose this time, wrapped the chain around the seatpost of the cargo bike again, and took a second to stand there, look at the bike, and congratulate myself on not having to spend $75 on a new lock. This was a win, right? Or at least not a loss? Maybe a tie.

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